Damian is doing his thing. He puts updates out on his social media platforms for people that are interested in it. I just can’t get my head around why people are getting so upset about something that shouldn’t impact their day one way or another. It’d be a bit like me going out of my way to buy Ed Sheeran CDs just so I could complain about how shit his music is. Or like @Ambrose_McNulty joining the Green Party so he could tell the members how farmers all think they’re a bunch of cunts. The Green Party know they’re a bunch of cunts. Ed Sheeran knows, deep down, that his music is shit. Let them off.
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You’d have more respect for a 60 year old Mary or Nuala in the accounts department, struggling with menial tasks, a young lad on drugs and battling a urinary tract infection. She’s getting on with it without a big song or dance.
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Getting on with climbing Everest or rowing the Atlantic? She’s a mighty woman in fairness to her.
Listen, lads do amazing feats every day, and dont make a big song and dance about it. @flano boxed the ears off a rabbit once, but do you hear him go on about it? Do you fuck.
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He’ll get as far as the gift shop
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This lad is clearly from Mayo in some shape or form. A nearly man.
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Is this cunt on the Late Late this week?
The TFK sheep have spoken
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Maaaaaaaaa
just wanna check if browner is going to make late Late couch tmrw or will he do interview at taxi drop off at fair city set?
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Did he row out today to take that?
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Probably some lad burning his rubbish
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at Furbo. His tall, 42-year-old frame is slightly stooped, as you’d expect, given what he has put it through. The hands are surprisingly soft but bent into a permanent curl. It will be months before the ache in their shortened tendons and ligaments begins to fade.
By way of small-talk, I remind him of the interview we did almost exactly ten years ago, while he was at Leinster, and how he’d been accompanied by Elmo, a three-year-old golden retriever. Mention of Elmo seems to push him close to the edge.
“Elmo’s no longer with us,” Browne says, solemnly. “Cancer took him in the end. He was so regal in the way that he battled it. I spoke to him a few times, out there on the ocean. (pause) Jesus, I didn’t think there would be tears this early in the interview!”
There is such a deep exhaustion in his eyes that you wonder if it is too soon to be putting him through this. But it’s as though his system is still pumping with adrenaline.
We don’t have to imagine the delirium he felt the Wednesday before last when he saw land for the first time in 108 days. The evidence is there on his Instagram account — the wildness in his eyes as he recites, in childish sing-song: “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with ‘I’.” Then he holds his phone aloft triumphantly so that we can see the faint outline of Skellig Michael in the distance. Yes, it’s Ireland. Even now he is still processing the hazardous journey that he took up the west coast towards home. The most dangerous part of any ocean row, he says, is near the end. Close to land, there are things to bump into and the waves are steeper. Did he sleep in the last three days of the journey? Maybe five, six hours in total, he reckons.
Monday night into Tuesday morning was horribly stressful — a black, angry, night. The winds that had kindly helped him through the strait between Inisheer and the Clare coastline were now working against him.
“I felt in control until I wasn’t,” he says. “My plan was to get inside Black Head, put the ground anchor down for the night and let the winds pass but they kept pushing us away from Black Head. Every sinew in me just wanted to shut down for the night but I couldn’t. We’re in shallow water so the waves come quicker and steeper. It’s pitch black so I’ve the beam on to keep an eye on the coast but I’m also side-on to these steep waves. I’ve rolled the majority of them — I can do a small turn of the oars and surf over them. But now I can’t see the waves coming in the darkness. Is the next one the one that’s going to knock me over?”
This wasn’t the ending he had scripted for Cushlamachree, the six-metre craft that he refers to as his “valiant steed”. By the time the Gardai reached him, following a distress call from Browne’s weather router Chris Martin, he was on his hands and knees, shoeless, crawling through a rock pool towards the beach.
Soon an ambulance had arrived. The paramedics conducted a brief medical but decided he needed a proper hospital examination. He politely declined. By now he had been joined by MacDara Hosty, friend and project manager, who lives in nearby Bearna. Hosty took him to his parents’ house to see Rozelle, his partner, and their 18-month-old daughter, Elodie.
“It was after 2am so I didn’t want to call, to alarm anyone,” he says. “I just knocked on the door. Rozelle was in one of the front bedrooms so she stuck her head out the window and said, ‘Who’s there?’ And I said, ‘Baby, it’s me. I’m home!’”
When they make the movie, people will say that bit is too Hollywood.
By the time that Elodie was fully awake, her dad was delighted — and relieved — to see that she had remembered him, even with the enormous nest of a beard, even with his gaunt cheeks, even though he was 30kg lighter than the last time she had seen him. This was why he had written so many letters for Rozelle to read to her, why he had recorded songs for her on voicenote.
Hours later, after snatches of sleep, he spoke to reporters near the Galway docks, where crowds had gathered to celebrate a feat of endurance that is still difficult to take in. “I learnt that I crave connection with people,” he said. “The way I would have framed things is that I’m an introvert,” he tells me. “Like when I was playing for Brive, I used to live out in the country, with Elmo. I used to think, ‘Am I not a social being?’ But that’s not the case. It’s just that my cup is filled quickly. But I need it, you know? It’s more important to me than I realised.”
Initially, this unsupported crossing had been a two-man operation. Browne had already rowed the Atlantic east to west in 2018 but pulling in the opposite direction is significantly more demanding. The winds are more treacherous, the currents less predictable. The evidence is there in statistics provided by the Ocean Rowing Society. Up to 2020, 156 successful solo rows were completed east to west. West to east? Just 16 successful crossings and 32 unsuccessful ones, with three rowers lost at sea.
So how did Browne feel about the project 13 days out of New York, when his friend and fellow rower Fergus Farrell had to be rescued, suffering from illness and exhaustion? Did he consider aborting? “The thought never entered my mind,” he says.
In his seven years as an extreme adventurer, Browne has tested his limits. He has completed the Marathon des Sables, a six-day 250km race across the Sahara with your survival kit carried on your back, has climbed Everest and Kilimanjaro. And so on. This was different.
“The toughest thing I’ve done,” he says. “Not physically tougher but mentally and emotionally by far the toughest because of the nature of it, because for 60 or 70 per cent of the days I was going backwards at some point. One day of that is grand but two or three days is hard. Sixty-three days of it is absolute psychological torture. I couldn’t believe the stress of it.
“Say you put in a two-hour shift on the oars and travel one or two nautical miles, then rest, then check the GPS and in the ten minutes since you stopped, you have already lost 0.3 or 0.4 of a nautical mile. Very stressful. You need a lot of luck. You might get some assistance from the Gulf Stream but I got no luck with winds on the second half of the crossing. The first half took 44 days, the second half 68 days. Rowing purgatory.”
Occasionally in his cabin he listened to a narration of Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton’s epic trans-Antarctic voyage in 1912. Entranced by the richness of the language, he could also identify with the constant, existential threat that those men experienced.
The most terrifying part of his crossing was the tropical storm that engulfed him for 16 or 17 hours on Day 24.
“Winds of 49, 50 knots,” he says. “I got capsized three times in the first six hours while on power anchor — and that’s not meant to happen. That anticipation of the fourth capsize were the longest hours of my life. I was mentally fried because the belief I had going into this is that the cabin is impenetrable and no matter what happens, I am always safe in the cabin but those three capsizes had shown that water was getting in and if the electrics were fried, you’re looking at all sorts of complications.
“So, you’re just lying there in the darkness, listening for it to come. And all the waves make different noises. Some of them make this hissing noise. And they’re bad. I’ve just learned that. They can rock the cabin in a way that can push you over.”
Browne has a great book in him. Still, no written account will capture the power and immediacy of his daily Deep Roots podcasts, recorded on his phone, in his cabin, after he had stored all equipment and utensils neatly — he has a touch of OCD, he admits. He is also a natural, soulful performer, something of a poet.
Try the podcast for Days 82 and 83 to hear the torment he is enduring as the Atlantic keeps rebuffing his best efforts: “I am getting pulverised in this battle,” he says. “Thoroughly deflated . . . I wake every morning with a sense of hope, opportunity, excitement, optimism. And they’re not thin layers. They’re genuinely thick blankets — values and beliefs that I have nurtured over years and years and years. Fuck me, they’ve been worn thin by the constant barrage of setbacks.”
The podcasts were cathartic. They also helped him to recognise his talent for storytelling — and storytelling is the basis of the motivational speaking business that he has set up.
What people will probably be most interest to know is: why? Why the insane desire to push himself to the limits of his physical and mental capabilities?
Browne talks about the importance of an individual reaching his or her full potential, how this is the greatest thing that they can achieve, also how pushing yourself to extremes can deliver rare insights and epiphanies. You wonder also if he was also driven by a lack of fulfilment from a pro rugby career that lasted 16 years.
For sure, he enjoyed a variety of experiences at Connacht, Northampton Saints, Brive, Leinster and Oyonnax and was well paid to play a game that he still loves. He doesn’t have a bag of medals at home, though. He was due one for the part he played early on in Leinster’s 2011-12 Heineken Cup campaign but he never went asking for it. Three years later it all ended rather tamely through injury, on a humdrum Friday night in the Top 14.
“It was a shit way to end,” he says. “You want it to be a final of some sort and for your family to be there. But few of us get the ending we want.
“I do regret not reaching potential as a rugby player. When I’ve talked to teams since, I explain that one of the reasons I was pulled so much towards extreme adventure was because it was an avenue where I could continue to explore something that held me back in rugby, which was my mind.
“I was an inconsistent rugby player because my mind was inconsistently organised. I could be the best player on the pitch one week and then the next I was the 125kg baggage that the whole team was carrying. If I had been seeing the right images or saying the right things to myself, I could have dealt with all the negative stuff that you have to deal with in professional sport.”
There is, of course, a simpler answer to the why question. This urge to test the edges is just in him. And this is not an urge that simply goes away. Yes, there are new responsibilities in his life. He and Rozelle will make their home in her native Queensland, near the Sunshine Coast. There is that business to grow, potentially that book to write. But then?
You sense that he doesn’t want this part of his life to end as it did in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when Cushlamachree smashed against the rocks at Furbo. He was heartbroken at what he perceived as a failed mission. “Honestly every bang against those rocks was ripping bits of my heart out,” he says. “I didn’t see it finishing like this.”
But in a symbolic sense, this was the perfect way to end — the haggard adventurer crawling ashore. He had propelled himself across a hostile and unforgiving ocean. He made land. He did it. “I never saw it till I came into the docks yesterday and saw all those people,” he says.
“Initially I was uncomfortable with the idea but people said: ‘What are you talking about? Everyone wants to see you come in.’ Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. So yeah, I do see how things came to fruition, almost. To crash on the rocks at Furbo, it’s kind of an adventurous ending. It makes a bit of sense.”
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Jesus what a cunt of a thing to say
Anger is an energy, and I’d expect a lad solo rowing for close to 100 days to use whatever he needed to get through. As someone that has often talked about your own mental challenges, I’m interested to know why his honesty is so difficult for you.
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It’s a more honest and genuine assessment of his emotions. I’d say when faced with that adversity you’d hate everything and anyone at some point in it.
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Gussy nearly died you’d swear he jumped off for the fun of it